I'm a songwriter who likes to draft some ideas in a notebook here and there and let those ideas sit for weeks or months at a time before I finalize it. I have dozens of unfinished ideas in my songwriting notebook, and by now, it's taken up about 3/4 of all the pages. One such song was a simple idea I had that was sitting in the back of my head for a while until I decided to sit down and write it.
Imagine a hermit crab. You have the typical image of a little crab that's about a quarter of the size of your hand with its iconic recognizable shell that it's known to hide inside whenever it feels threatened. It wears the shell on its back constantly as a little house to carry with it everywhere. This was the image I had in my mind as I penned some ideas for a song titled "Shell."
I wanted to write about the feeling of feeling uncomfortable inside your own skin, whether due to a lack of confidence or from lacking a general sense of identity. This concept immediately connected to the image of a hermit crab to me, so I wanted to build off of that theme by including analogies related to the ocean, since that was the environment a hermit crab lived in.
These ideas of mine were mostly written in March 2024. Like most of my other songwriting ideas, I had a moment of inspiration where I'd write every idea I could think of, then when the spark died out, I let it sit. It wasn't until 2 months later that I came back to this idea.
Funny enough, this project was a class assignment. I had to write a song as my final project for my Audio Production class. It was meant to be a group project, but having dealt with technical issues and a shortage of time, I ended up doing most of the work on my end, but my classmates did help however they could. We were crammed with other projects we had to do at the same time and spent many a sleepless night trying to finish those too, so I ended up taking on most of the responsibility for my song. I kept telling them I had my ideas planned out and that I knew what I wanted to do, but I never had to rush making a song before. I was worried I wouldn't be happy with it and that I wouldn't have enough time to polish the mix and master. I had to use Pro Tools to make the song, but I'm a native FL Studio user. So needless to say, the whole thing was stressful.
Day 1:
I was getting more and more invested in playing piano lately, and I came up with a simple piano pattern: a melancholy chord progression in B minor. All I had was an intro in mind at the time, and at first I wasn't sure what lyrics or concept to pair it with until I flipped through my lyrics. I found Shell to be a good fit. I figured with a sad song concept like Shell, the instrumental should be mellow but also dramatic. Something simple but heart-wrenching. I love getting to work with piano, because I feel like I have more freedom with picking out notes and chord progressions. Additionally, I was more familiar with piano anyway, having played it since a young age. I spent a lot of time playing this simple pattern over and over again, thinking about how I can change it up for the different structures of the song. I met with my classmates and pitched my idea to them to hear their thoughts. They left some feedback, and I kept working.
It was April 28th, and my project was due May 1st. Realizing I had to rush this process, I immediately started to translate my idea from voice memo recordings on my phone to MIDI patterns onto FL Studio. I worked on this in my dorm on my desktop. I also decided to sprinkle some open guitar strums in the chorus to add a sort of sparkling sound to the song. One of my classmates in my group was a drummer, so I decided to let him take care of writing out drum patterns for the song and we would record it together when we were all free. I made a simple drum pattern, but I intended for him to replace it with his own idea later. So far, I had a fully written piano idea, guitar fully recorded, a draft of drum patterns paired with risers, and some simple strings. I rendered out my draft and put in Google Drive for my classmates to listen to.
Day 2:
We spent the day before working on a different project where we had to record a livestream of a musical our school was performing. We had to create a stereo and surround mixdown of 4 songs we were assigned to work on. That kept us busy the whole day and we were too stressed to multitask, so we put off Shell for a day. When we were ready, I intended for the three of us to meet up, around 10:45-11 PM. I would run the board while one of my classmates recorded his drums into the song. Currently, I had just the audio rendered out, but I planned on exporting the piano and strings into MIDIs and everything else as full audio stems. He and I recorded the drums. Later, I found out our recording system was a complete failure, and none of the mics even picked up the drums. So we wasted our time recording drums that never recorded to begin with. I LOVE DEALING WITH TECHNICAL PROBLEMS! :D
I ended up having to stick with my backup drums and exporting the audio for those too, since our real drums didn't work. I went back to my room and rendered out the drum audio before going back to the audio lab to put the project together, where it was a bit past 11. I spent the next 2 hours songwriting.
Day 3:
Day 2 and Day 3 bled into each other. I spent almost the entire night working on this song. By the time I finished the lyrics, it was about 1 AM. I told my classmates recording vocals should take me a half hour and tuning them should take me another half hour. Silly me, I forget I can be extremely picky with my vocals. I didn't have a studio I felt comfortable recording in, since many of us were cramming our own projects in the audio lab. I recorded my vocals in my car, in the back seat, with my little interface and USB mic plugged into my laptop. I also decided to record some backing vocals, which further added onto the amount of time I spent on vocals. They had a "screaming-in-pain" sort of sound to them, which perfectly fit the painful sound I wanted them to reflect, as well as the amount of mental anguish I was experiencing in that moment, knowing I was hours away from this assignment being marked as late. :D They took me closer to like 2 hours to record. It was 3 AM, and I was running on a medium-sized mocha from my school's coffee shop to keep me awake, but the only thing it made me feel was stressed and nauseous.
I recorded on my laptop, but the project file was on my desktop in my dorm. So I had to render out all the recorded vocals, put them onto a USB, and plug it into my desktop to tune from there. Tuning took me about another hour. I also spent more time doing a rough mix on the song so I knew what kind of mix I wanted the Pro Tools version to have. I'm also picky with my mixes too, so I spent more time than I anticipated. I rendered out the raw stems and MIDIs and walked to the academic building where the audio lab was, which was where I had to work on the song on Pro Tools. It was a 5-10 minute walk from my dorm, but it felt like forever. It was eerily quiet and dark out, save for the sound of birds chirping and me talking to myself over how insane I was to be staying up as late as I was. When I moved everything to Pro Tools, I couldn't find the drums audio, so I walked back to my dorm, rendered it out again, and walked back to my classroom, which was another excruciating 20 or so minutes. Especially after finding out the audio was already there to begin with.
It was about 4-5 AM and I was sitting alone in the classroom, mixing my MIDIs and audio. By the time I finished, it was about 6 AM. I was exhausted and cringing at the final result of the rushed abomination I created. But it was done. I submitted everything online, and slept for the 3 or so hours I had left.
Presenting my song:
I left my classmates with this text at 1 AM before I shared the final product in class the next day:
"I don’t wanna scare either of you but this song is so beyond depressing I’m almost scared to share in class tomorrow. I mean we’re this far in so of course I will but I’m nervous to see everyone’s reactions lol". I did a fantastic job of reassuring them that everything was under control, clearly.
When the time came, I was extremely nervous. I heard the other groups' projects, which consisted of two other songs, and an animatic with accompanying film score, all done on Pro Tools.
By the time my song came up, everyone was dead quiet as it played, and I was sitting there in my spot wanting to pull my hair out and die of embarrassment. To my surprise, everyone (or at least everyone who gave me feedback) seemed thoroughly impressed, especially my professor. I hated how depressing the song was and thought it was too overly dramatic, but he didn't mind it, understanding that many songs tend to have a similar depressing feel anyway.
My grade came back a few days later and I scored perfectly on the rubric with an A+. My professor continued raving about how fantastic he thought the song was to me and to my mom at my graduation.
Aftermath
I thought maybe I could share the song online when I finished it, depending on if I liked how it sounded. I didn't feel ready to publish it to the world, but I did share it on my Discord server. I commented on it saying I felt it needed work and I wanted to cringe at it, but the couple of responses I received begged to differ. Still, I felt it could use some changes. I wasn't fully happy with the version I presented in class, so I let it sit on the backburner for another 3 months.
I kept it in the back of my head and waited until I finally wanted to set aside time to look it over and adjust it. Most of the changes I ended up making started in my bed at 1 AM, looking over and changing the lyrics I wrote on Google Docs. The next day, I tweaked the lyrics a bit more and re-recorded and tuned my vocals. I polished up the mix and decided it was ready.
I commissioned an artist for the art piece I had in mind for the video and album cover and got my results back, which I fell in love with. I decided I wanted to release this song as a single, but also include it in an album I drafted about coming to terms with a toxic relationship and learning to let go of the hate and self-loathing I was feeling. I didn't intend for Shell to be part of an album when I started it, but I think it does sort of fit into the theme I had for that concept album. I'd be happy to place it in a bigger project where it has room to resonate.
As of when I'm publishing this post, Shell isn't released yet, but I'm trying to plan out a day for it. Poisonous Myth's second album "Floor Vibes" releases in 2 weeks, and I want Shell to have its own time to shine. I'm also still working on the lyric video, so while the audio is done, it's not ready for YouTube yet.
I will be leaving you with some of my work-in-progress lyrics. The lyrics in bold are what I changed later.
One of these things is not like the other
They’re all composed, I can’t keep it together
I’m a fish out of water, struggling to breathe
Petrified of what’s underneath
For so long I wore myself thin
Feels like years, yet I still don’t fit in
I’d give anything to change out of my skin
But I can’t change the person within
I hide in my shell but I don’t like what I see
Who is this stranger looking back at me?
Can’t love who I am and let myself be
I’d rather be anybody else but me
Wave after wave, lost the will to be brave
Bury myself underneath the sand
I hate what I do, I hate what I say
I’m so sick of trying to meet these demands
One of these things is not like the other
I see black and white but they dream in colors
I’m in troubled waters, can’t breach the surface
Terrified of the name “worthless”
One of these things is not like the other
They’re breathing easy, I continue to suffer
This well’s running dry, I’m thirsting and starving
Terrified of the road uncharted
Currently, Shell has been released on Bandcamp and is soon to release on all other music stores, as well as a video coming out eventually. Here's a link to the finished song for your listening pleasure! https://livandlearnmusic.bandcamp.com/track/shell-single
While Shell is processing on other music stores, here is a pre-save link:
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